Did Tony Soprano kill the novel? Of course not, but there's something to this, all the same:

And so we return to the central question: why is this television show referred to by so many literate viewers as a novel? The answer lies inside the twisted dynamic of the form's readership. The American novel - unlike its French, German, or even British counterparts - was not designed to run on small drip fuel. It begs for big shelf space, bulging reading groups, room to be talked about. Look back at the past 70 years of American fiction. All of the major novels - Richard Wright's Black Boy, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jack Kerouac's On the Road - were big bestsellers upon publication; today, all of them have sold well over a million copies, without a turbo boost from Oprah. In real numbers, their readership is still dwarfed by the number of Americans who regularly watched The Sopranos or even Seinfeld, but factor in the far smaller number of people who read fiction and you can see that these authors have achieved market penetration.

In so doing, these novels became part of our reality. "Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes," wrote William S Burroughs in a poem memorialising his friend. It might take 30 years, as it did with Cormac McCarthy's work, to get recognised; or it might happen instantaneously, the way Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance flew off the shelves. But no novel will ever be read simultaneously, with the exception of Harry Potter's final lap, which comes soon, the way people watch movies or television.

This doesn't mean the novel is dead, however, as so many literary Kevorkians, fingers on the pulse of a wax corpse, like to claim. In the ranks of American novelists today, there are writers with plenty of lively ideas, from Denis Johnson to Ha Jin, all of whom have major autumn publications on the way. The problem is that the audience just might not be there.